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Free the Philosophical Beast

The Stone is a forum for contemporary philosophers and other thinkers on issues both timely and timeless.

When I entered college nearly a quarter-century ago, my two main concerns were playing soccer and preparing for a successful career as a certified public accountant, like my older brother had. The two “philosophers” with whom I was most familiar were Jesus and the apostle Paul. I was born and raised in a small town in Pennsylvania, and immersed in a church modeled after the Plymouth Brethren tradition, where the Bible was taken literally as the inerrant word of God. But by the time I was ready to graduate, soccer and a business career — and my religious belief — had taken a back seat to two other things that had bitten me hard: poetry and philosophy. In the 20 years since, the intersection of the two has been my overwhelming preoccupation.

I feel I owe a debt to philosophy. It liberated me; it gave me the courage to leave behind the comfort and security of a religious worldview, and provided me with a purpose I will be glad to pursue for the rest of my life. So despite having a demanding day job as a guide dog mobility instructor, I spend much of my free time studying it, working out my own positions and trying to inject it into popular culture so that others can be touched by it the way I was. I’ve become not an academic philosopher, but a sort of hybrid — a philosophy journalist.

Last year, for instance, I wrote an article for a popular nonacademic magazine that discussed the possibility of establishing a secular foundation for morality, using Bilbo Baggins’s riddle game with Gollum in “The Hobbit”as an example. The piece wasn’t worthy of a Kant or a Hume, but it wasn’t meant to be.

I wrote it because I really do believe we need philosophy journalists in the same way and for the same reason we have science journalists — to prepare the arcana of academia into a dish digestible by the public. But philosophy journalists like me certainly aren’t enough — we also need professional philosophers practicing their craft outside the academy. Let me use a literary analogy to explain why.

In 1903 the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, at the prompting of his friend and mentor, the sculptor Auguste Rodin, went to the Jardin des Plantes in Paris to choose one of the animals there, study it, then write about it. Rilke chose the panther, and after observing and meditating on the beast, wrote his now famous poem “The Panther,” which begins: His gaze has from the passing of the bars / grown so tired, that it holds nothing anymore. / It seems to him there are a thousand bars / and behind a thousand bars no world.

I would argue that Rilke’s panther is an apt symbol for contemporary philosophy, and that we need to reintroduce this noble beast back into the wild because, like the panther, it has become detached and devitalized. The only thing that many academic philosophers see today are innumerable bars to personal and professional progress.

Nigel Warburton, who left his position as a senior lecturer at the Open University in 2013 to devote his time to the popular Philosophy Bites podcast, among other things, told me it was primarily the limited opportunities for teaching subjects that he was interested in that led him to leave. “It didn’t work for me. Perhaps that’s my problem,” he said. “But I’ve been heartened by the number of academics who have written to me saying they feel more or less the same but don’t have a straightforward escape route.” He added that he wished more philosophers would follow suit, but that “many are too timid, or are effectively gagged on controversial topics by their institutions.”

Another philosopher who left academia to try his luck in “nature red in tooth and claw” is Dan Fincke, the author of Camels With Hammers, a blog on the atheist channel of Patheos. Fincke told me that, like Warburton, he left his position as an adjunct philosophy professor at both Hofstra and Fordham Universities because of “the demands to produce technical scholarship rather than just continue to follow my philosophical interests.” Fincke is a prolific blogger who was excited by the prospect of being able to “speak to the wider educated lay audience out there about the relevance of philosophical concepts to what they actually cared about.” In addition to his daily blog, he also runs an online philosophy class via videoconference. Others like Warburton and Fincke have said that they’ve heard from a number of academic philosophers who can’t find a viable or acceptable way to leave academia that the scholarly life can be frustratingly stifling. As the second verse of Rilke’s poem continues: The supple pace of powerful soft strides, / turning in the very smallest circle, / is like a dance of strength around a center / in which a great will stands numbed.

The strength of philosophy — the unflinching interrogation of existence, in accord with the highest standards of reasoned argument — is mostly being exercised between academics relegated to making incremental refinements to their areas of specialization (a point made in The Stone recently by the philosopher, professor and author Quassim Cassam). The will to share it with the outside world is lacking — it’s too embedded into the ecosystem of the Ivory Zoo.

The saddest part of Rilke’s poem — and to my mind, of the state of modern philosophy — comes in the final verse: Only sometimes the curtain of the pupils / soundlessly slides up —. Then an image enters, / glides through the limbs’ taut stillness, / dives into the heart and dies.

After centuries of pacing the cramped halls of academia, the philosophical beast has, much like Rilke’s panther, been tamed. The philosophical beast of Socrates’s time walked the streets, held court all night at drinking parties, debated playwrights and otherwise actively engaged with the public. And while the vitality of that activity is mostly lacking today, there are exceptions. In addition to podcasts, blogs, and articles for popular consumption, there are even more tangible ways of making philosophy vibrant and relevant again. For Grace Robinson, the director of Thinking Space, this means spending time in art organizations, secondary schools, businesses, community groups and charities with people “who want to think and talk together for all kinds of reasons.”

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But Robinson, who has an undergraduate degree in philosophy and also runs the “Philosophy Exchange” program at the University of Leeds, observes that the discipline of philosophy is very top-heavy: “Most philosophers are clustered at the top end of the spectrum and consequently tend to show one another what is possible, making contributions that inspire and challenge their colleagues and advancing a discipline that has already left most people behind.”

None of this is meant to dismiss the work of academic philosophy out of hand. As Robinson puts it, “If every academic spent most of their time in the sandpit philosophizing with 5-year-olds, the great teaching, debating and writing that drives philosophy forward would stall.” And just as we don’t criticize the field of genetics, for example, because the details of its mechanisms aren’t easily summarized in an article in Discover or The New York Times, I don’t intend to do the same for philosophy.

But I think the key difference between science and philosophy is that we need the results of science more than we need everyone in the body politic “doing science.” By contrast, we need everyone “doing philosophy” more than we need the results of philosophy. In other words, we don’t need to know or understand how the scientist has gone from the minute molecular intricacies of DNA to a public good like genetic counseling. On the other hand, the emulation of the critical thinking and logical argument of a philosopher is a virtue that can be applied to any area of life — from where you stand on the most important social and political issues of the day to how best to spend the rest of your days on this planet.

And it’s well known that academic philosophers also play a crucial role in teaching younger generations how to think for themselves. In response to an email I sent him, Massimo Pigliucci, the new K.D. Irani Professor of Philosophy at The City College of New York, told me that “there is value in gathering the best minds we have in one quiet place where they can work somewhat shielded from the preoccupations of everyday life, and where they can teach what they know, and especially how to think, to younger generations.” Pigliucci is able to reach people through his work inside as well as outside the academy. He is a rare hybrid who nourished his inner beast via his long-running Rationally Speaking blog (recently closed), and writing for outlets like the Skeptical Inquirer, Philosophy Now and The Stone. He’s even made an appearance as a “noted European” on “The Colbert Report.”

So “powerful, soft strides” toward the reintroduction of the philosophical beast are being made outside the academy, but I would like to see even more philosophers become feral. Being feral is different from being wild, of course — the philosophical beast that still calls the academy its home just needs a wider space in which to roam, and maybe venture more often outside its walls.